There's something about Larry Summers

Larry Summers appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1999 as part of “The Committee to Save the World” from a global financial crisis. Nearly 15 years later, the former Treasury Secretary faces a loosely organized “Committee to Save the World from Larry Summers.”

This committee has no official membership. It holds no formal meetings. But it includes a vocal mix of influential bloggers, The New York Times editorial page, women’s groups, financial-reform advocates and liberal members of the Senate Democratic caucus.

Text Size

-

+

reset

Obama's delayed Summers nominatioion may just cause trouble

This week in politics

For various reasons, these people are doing all they can to stop Summers, a former top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, from becoming the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. This group is pressing Obama instead to nominate Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen to succeed Ben Bernanke when the chairman’s second term ends in January. Yellen would be the first woman to hold the post.

Some of Summers’s detractors are angered by what they call his poor past treatment of women. But for many others, the gender issue is just a more easily wielded club to attack him. Their real complaint is that he is a centrist, Clinton-era retread ill-suited to steer an anemic economy back to health.

Summers, of course, has his strong proponents, especially where it counts: inside the West Wing and behind the desk in the Oval Office.

Multiple sources close to the White House told POLITICO that while no decision has been made, Summers remains Obama’s preferred choice and the leading candidate for the job. Representatives for Summers and the White House declined to comment. The key questions: Can Summers withstand a summer assault from the forces arrayed against him? And, if nominated, can he win approval in the Senate?

As the unusually spicy summer chase for the Fed chairmanship heats up, here is POLITICO’s guide to the “Case Against Larry Summers” and rebuttals from some prominent supporters, including Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, a Summers protégé, and former top Obama adviser and reelection campaign manager, Jim Messina.

Argument 1: Summers is bad for women.

There are at least two strains of this argument, one from those who truly believe Summers holds sexist views that should disqualify him, the other from those who don’t like his policy approach but sense the potency of the gender argument.

There’s also a hybrid third strain: Summers is a bully born of an all-male, all-centrist economic cabal whose roots trace to former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. This clique is said to include former Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as well as current senior Obama adviser (and former Clinton adviser) Gene Sperling. All men, all more or less centrist.

And all of these people, according to the Times editorial page, are behind an underground campaign to “install” Summers as Fed chairman and continue the dominance of the middle-of-the-road men’s club. This argument ignores the fact that current White House Office of Management and Budget Director Sylvia Mathews Burwell also comes from the Rubin line of top-tier economic advisers.

Those who truly believe Summers is anti-woman say that when he served as National Economic Council chairman under Obama, he regularly ignored senior female advisers, including Christina Romer, who indicated to the Times early this week that she would prefer to see Yellen get the job.

Some prominent women’s groups agree. They want to install the first female Fed chair and are blasting Summers for comments he made as Harvard president about a theory that women may lag in science because of “issues of intrinsic aptitude.”

“You don’t want someone who feels free to say disparaging things about entire classes of Americans,” National Organization for Women President Terry O’Neill said. “This is not the kind of person we want to nominate, particularly when we have a bench of other people that could do the job — and could probably do it better.”

But women who worked with Summers at the Treasury, the White House and in the private sector say this description does not even remotely match the man they know.

Half a dozen women interviewed by POLITICO described Summers as a major promoter of and mentor to women in the Obama and Clinton administrations. They described him as tough, opinionated and demanding of high performance — both from men and women.

“Everyone needs to be judged on their merits, and it’s not fair to judge Larry as someone who is not supportive of women because that is not the record,” said Sandberg, who rose to become Summers’s chief of staff at Treasury and is now the COO at Facebook. Sandberg credited a major speech Summers gave in the early 1990s on the importance of educating girls in developing countries as critical in injecting the issue into public debate. “The thing that’s missing here is that Larry cares deeply about issues for women in the economy,” Sandberg said.

Women who worked with Summers in the White House said his clashes with Romer were no different than with male advisers.

Other former colleagues said Summers promoted women to higher jobs and mentored them. “My experiences with Larry was very positive,” said Neera Tanden, who worked with Summers in the White House on health care reform and now heads the Center for American Progress, for which Summers is a senior fellow. Tanden said she and Summers repeatedly clashed on issues. “There were very spirited disagreements. But I found him to be very respectful of everyone, including those who disagreed with him.”

Argument 2: Summers would be too hard to confirm.

Some political handicappers suggest that Summers is too divisive and would cause a rift with the liberal wing of the party. These people say it would be too hard to get the 60 votes needed to push Summers through the Senate and that Yellen — widely respected, deeply experienced and with a far lower profile — would be a decidedly easier lift.

“The White House has to decide if they think they can just ignore all the noise around Larry and slam this through in a couple of months,” said a Democratic Senate aide who works for a senator who opposes Summers. The aide was not authorized to speak publicly. “Do they really want to get bogged down in this, fairly or not, being about misogyny? And because it’s about gender and not esoteric monetary or regulatory issues, it’s not going to go away.”